The Formula

No easy answers indeed…

The other day I was having a most pleasant time browsing in a record shop in Camberwell that specialises chiefly in dub records. The staff thought I was a clever boy as I’d recognised that they were playing Yellowman in the background – not really that clever, since I know of only one albino toasting about the size of his penis…

One of the fellows behind the counter recommended a record to me. It was the Swimmer One album “The Regional Variations” and I was excited to see a staff written note praising the record as a cross between The Divine Comedy and Boards of Canada. Now I’m a massive fan of Neil Hannon – simply one of the archest and cleverest men working in pop today, and a loyal listener of Boards of Canada – they do uncomfortable ambience very well, and I’d just that day been listening to their remix of cLOUDDEAD’s “Dead Dogs Two” – a peculiar Sergeant Pepperish tale for the noughties that I recommend. Anyway, two groups I adore. Crossed, mixed, multiplied - whatever. So I bought the record.

I was most disappointed. Whilst indisputably sounding like The Divine Comedy and Boards of Canada, and lots of other things besides – shades of Pulp, Belle and Sebastian, The Associates, the Pet Shop Boys were all present – it sounded by far their lesser. I’m not going to review the album in any kind of depth, since frankly it bored me and would bore me thusly to review it – suffice to say I find there to be a curious lack of melody that sticks in the brain and the production does it little favours (“You listen to music on such crap speakers!” “Ah, but if it’s any good it will transcend such material concerns” “Shut up Ben”). I will listen again in a while of course – everyone gets things wrong – but I think I’ve made my mind up on this one sadly.

This all got me thinking. The conclusion of such dangerous cogitation was the realisation that there isn’t a formula for good music. Of perhaps all the mediums, music most ratifies the subjective within me – I respond so passionately and occasionally vehemently that I treat it almost objectively. This is both brilliant, but in many ways highly annoying. I long for the formula. Why can’t a x b = ab ever truly work? There seems to be no guarantee that I will enjoy ab.

And yet so often I do enjoy ab. What are The Divine Comedy but a knowing reference to so many of the greats of our time: Bowie, Brel, Coward, Merritt and Walker (now there’s a festival line-up I would actually be interested in seeing!) and the great devices they employ – comedy, nostalgia, strings, vibrato, wit et al? The process is even referenced in the wonderful "Perfect Lovesong" offof (a brilliant word I've picked up from Alan Warner's "Morvern Callar" but I think Paul Magrs may have used it first) "Regeneration", nevermind the numerous cover versions of the songs of the above. Boards of Canada have raided the archive of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, watched late-night Open University programmes, Protect and Survive prophecies of doom – all the stuff that spooks me but fascinates me - with frightening but delightful results. Top tip for those as sad as me/have a clue what I’m on about: watch the 70s BBC training video “Barry Letts demonstrates CSO” with “Music has the right to children” on in the background. Terrifying. If I ever remake “The Stone Tape” I know who I’ll get in touch to do the incidental music…

All this thought of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop means I’ll have to dematerialise and go and listen to some. Maybe Delia Derbyshire will appear to me in a dream and explain the formula – she studied Music and Maths at Girton don’t you know? She used to appear in my dreams in a terrifying period in early 2003, operating tape reels bigger and hotter than the sun. Frightening but then so’s this why-how-music-works stuff. Not science but alchemy.

Can't Buy Me Love...

A recent find has been the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams. I owe this discovery to my friend Maya who sang some of his pieces excellently at her concert at the West London Synagogue in December. I’d been a fan of Henry, Purcell, Benjamin Britten and English vocal music in general for a number of years (the joint result of listening to “The Wicker Man” soundtrack and the Norton Anthology of English Literature cd too much as a youth) so quite how he had passed me by I don’t know, but thanks Maya…

What attracts me to Vaughan Williams so much is his ability to seamlessly match interesting words – often those written by other great talents such as Shakespeare, Whitman and Housman – with interesting but above all else, apposite music. It is highly contestable to call him one of this country’s great pop talents, but I am a contestable kind of chap and as he set so many folk pieces to music – folk being to my mind at least, pop before the age of mass everything. – so brilliantly, a pop talent is what I’m going to call him.

But this is not to say that folk and pop are wholly easy bedfellows. Indeed, listening to Vaughan Williams, I find for all the similarities, one marked difference. To peruse this further, one should consult a Traditional piece such as “The Lawyer”. A city lawyer encounters a pretty maid heading off to work in the meadows, where her father mows. Struck by her pulchritude, he offers to take her to “London town and all such lovely places” as well as “a silken gown, Gold rings and gold chains and laces.” Now interestingly, the maid rejects everything he offers, the result being:

And now she is a poor man’s wife,
Her husband dearly loves her;
She lives a sweet and contented life,
There’s no lady in town above her.

“The Lawyer” establishes itself as a realist song – people work, have family to support, money matters – but then ends on such an idealistic note. But then why do I consider it so idealistic? Because it is so markedly different from what one encounters in the realist pop of more recent years (i.e. none of that “I will always love you” type nonsense). Lucy Jordan resorts to dreaming in “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan” to escape the drab, humdrum realities of her life, with the memorable central wish of driving through Paris “in a sports car, with the warm wind in her hair…”. Those fine chroniclers of South London metro-boulot-dodo, Difford and Tilbrook use Vanity Fair as a kind of ideal that the unnamed girl returns to throughout her working life of factories, butchers and pubs in the Squeeze song of the same name. In “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye” – one of the best pop songs of the eighties – Marc Almond bemoans his current situation, but who is he fooling when he states that he’s going to find himself: “A nice little housewife who’ll give me a steady life, And won’t keep going off the rails”? And why is he seeing a woman anyway? I’m well aware that there are exceptions to the rule, but they kind of tend to be drowned out amid our more material fetishes – for every “Can’t Buy Me Love” in the canon of The Beatles, there’s a “Baby You Can Drive My Car” – cheerful star-fucking inanity if ever I came across it…

Love in the modern realist pop song seems to have deleterious consequences unless moored up against a six figure income. While I’m not saying that every realist pop song should end a la “The Lawyer” in some perfect romance played out amidst the bucolic idyll, surely there are plenty of happy people in love with one another, with not much money? You may even have been one of them at some point. If I could take this thought on pop music any further, it would be to examine when this sea change occurred. The lazy pop historian in me would suggest it’s a product of post war (i.e. World War Two) materialism and egocentricity; a corollary of the “me” generation. But then I’m well aware of songs such as Irving Berlin’s 1929 “Putting on the Ritz” in which love is somehow better if you’re dressed in fancy clothes. Shockingly, I kind of think that’s true. Pop music eh? No easy answers…

Car Parks and Prescience

It is with my customary sadness that I hear that another interesting and historic building is to be demolished. The Trinity Centre Multi-Storey Car Park in Gateshead is set to be razed soon to make way for a Tesco development. My immediate thought was that it would be such a shame to lose such a classic piece of Brutalist architecture ... far better conceived and implemented than many of its contemporaries I would argue, with its external staircase being referenced in a variety of subsequent buildings, most noticeably the Lloyd's Building designed by Richard Rogers. The Lloyd's Building is not a bad building to compare the Trinity Centre Car Park to, representing as it does another architect's idea for the future, albeit a more playfully postmodern one. Such interesting phases of ideas that buildings such as the Car Park represent will cease to exist in the built world if we continue demolishing them before their deserved listing arrives in the next few decades.

I reject any arguments arguing that the building deserves to be demolished on account of being "ugly" as it is to be replaced by a Tesco. It is not merely the likely identical nature of this Tesco with a previously-built cousin that worries me, more that in perversely following the saga I will be inflicted to one of those terrible "artist's impressions" architects now knock up on computers. Always lit in the washed-out, eel-grass fronds of light that accompany transmissions from the sea bed, its the people that populate them that alarm me ... unburdened by the many shopping bags they carry, discussing whether it is to be pizza or ten-pin bowling next, or simply more shopping.

And let's not forget that at the heart of this sad affair is an actual man. Owen Luder is fast and unfairly becoming Britain's most demolished architect. Approaching eighty, he has witnessed many of his key works (e.g. the Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth) face dynamite and digger and unrepentant, often protests in a dignified manner (in stark contrast to local ochlocracies e.g. the Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth). While there are serious problems with many of his buildings (though many it must be said stemming from terrible neglect by local councils), I still feel peculiarly sorry for him. How must it feel to see your life's work destroyed in your lifetime? And especially when it was a life devoted to constructing permanent structures... Punished for pursuing grand projects, Owen Luder's output has become ephemeral within four decades.

Thinking about Luder got me thinking about the Car Park's major claim to fame, its appearance in one of the best films ever made, "Get Carter". Those of you who haven't seen it really ought to ... any film featuring Michael Caine, John Osborne (!), Ian Hendry, Tony Beckley, George Sewell and Britt Ekland should be top of your list anyway. The Ted Lewis novel on which the film is based, "Jack's Return Home" is well worth a read to, if only for its fabulously pulp fiction opening: "The rain rained.". It might be rubbish, but it makes perfect sense to anyone raised north of Sheffield...

Anyway, in the film, Jack Carter throws local "big man" (in a number of senses) Cliff Brumby off the top of the building* in his attempts to seek revenge for the murder of his brother. I have often thought of Newcastle as the star of the film ... looking exceedingly grim and gritty, a post-war "craphouse" to borrow Carter's phrase.

In this sense, Brumby's attempts to regenerate the city become quite interesting. He is meeting with two rather well-spoken (though not as well-spoken as John Osborne!) architects about his plans for the complex. I always thought the inference here was that Brumby, supposedly a legitimate businessman, was involved in some highly murky urban regeneration a la Newcastle antiheroes T. Dan Smith and John Poulson. But then I realised that "Get Carter" was filmed in 1970 and released a year later ... a whole year before the first wave of scandal broke. Let's not forget how big a wave it was whilst we're at it, claiming Reginald Maudling's position as Home Secretary - I wonder whether other current and dubious schemes such as Pathfinder will go on to claim political casualties...

Now maybe Mike Hodges knew something back then, but the fact remains that "Get Carter" starts to look like a peculiarly prescient piece of film, in addition to its many other strengths.

"Hang on! Hang on!" I hear you cry. What's any of this got to do with pop music? Well I began to think the above curiously, whilst listening to a rather prescient pop record, Randy Newman's "Political Science". It suddenly occurred to me just how much more successfully this record encapsulates America now than it possibly did in 1972, when it first appeared on "Sail Away". True, the nuclear threat may have diminished, but the record always seems to me to be far more about the political and cultural reasons behind the nuclear threat; the finger behind the button rather than the button itself. The America of "Political Science" seems very much a country troubled by its loss in status, a place where "even our old friends put us down" and where political and cultural isolationism seem to be the safest tactic. This all seems incredibly apposite today.

This got me thinking about how the future is depicted in the supposedly here today gone tomorrow world of pop. Is prescience ever more than a happy accident in pop music? Do we really want our records to be prescient or is pop all about the here and now? I started digging through tracks to answer these questions...

Gosh, I hope pop records aren't prescient. This was the finding of a Saturday morning's research. Can anyone name an optimistic track about the future? Most are in Newman's nuclear idiom (and pretty entertaining they are too. Honourable mentions for Tom Lehrer's exquisite "We will all go together when we go", Nena's bonkers "99 Luftballons" and Frankie Goes To Hollywood's muscular "Two Tribes") or else seem simply to be fairly banal statements of what's going to happen in the near future: as Angie Brown sang, "I'm gonna get you baby, I'm gonna get you yes I am".

I was in a fairly morbid mood by the time I reached my tailor's on Saturday. All over-friendly hands, he told me how nice it was to see me again. "The second suit I work on for you ... where I come from we say you need only five suits in your lifetime - one for first confirmation, one for dogfighting and chasing women, one to marry in, one to watch your kids marry in and one to be buried in." Great, I thought, he's mapped my life out and I've already got enough suits in my wardrobe before I even met the fellow. I ended up in a tat shop near Bethnal Green where I bought some turn of the century Waite Tarot cards - always been intrigued by the drawings and their supposed significance. On the tube to Soho I shuffled and drew one. Death. I know Death doesn't mean Death, but when the first card you draw is Death you think Death, Death. On returning in the late hours of Sunday morning I frapped up the computer and told Media Player to play a random track. It chose "In the Year 2525 (Exordium and Terminus)" by Zager and Evans, a cheery little number about how mankind's quest for ever-greater technology will bring about its destruction...

I am beginning to think I am doomed, and I still have a lot of pop records to listen to. My advice is never to care too much about the demolition of a multi-storey car park ... you'll only end up frightened.

* And the actor Bryan Mosley into a long-lasting stint as Alf Roberts in "Coronation Street" or so I thought. The Lancashire network of great aunts were consulted on this matter and they said he'd been in it back in the sixties. Further research proves they're right - he was a semi-regular character from 1961-63. Always believe your great aunts.

I Hear a New World

1. When Joe Meek’s studio shamanism became too loud, his landlady at 304 Holloway Road apparently used to bang on the ceiling below with a broom.

2. I’ve always liked to think that she would have tapped on the ceiling anyway, whether the music was too loud or not. I imagine she did not consider much of what he was up to “music”.

3. Joe Meek used to retaliate by positioning his speakers in the stairwell. This may well have been the start of The End.

4. In 1959 Joe Meek was working on a concept album about outer space entitled ‘I Hear a New World – an Outer Space Music Fantasy’. He was engaged on this project with a former skiffle group called Rod Freeman & the Blue Men. Only partly released in excised (exorcised?) form in March 1960, it would not be released in anything approaching its finished form until 1991.

5. Although I’m sure this late release can be put down to a variety of commercial and legal reasons, nevertheless it is fair to say that ‘I Hear a New World’ made far less of a splash in 1991 than it would have done had it been properly released in 1960.

6. This is because the world had moved on. Pop, punk, disco etcetera etcetera.

7. ‘I Hear a New World – an Outer Space Music Fantasy’ still represents a watershed in innovation on account of its remarkable use of electronic sound. I would argue for its genius.

8. Much of what Joe Meek pioneered had not only become commonplace (multiple over-dubbing on one- and two-track machines, close miking, direct input of bass guitars, the compressor, and effects like echo and reverb, as well as sampling) but had been surpassed. Harold Wilson’s “white heat of technology” had proved hotter. By the 1980s, one could accomplish with a Fairlight above and beyond not only Meek’s output but the output of even a few years previously. All in one box.

9. Nevertheless, it would be truly impossible to ever recreate Meek’s output. Though with a Fairlight an eighties musician could have sampled their toilet flushing and modified it to sound like a space rocket taking off, just as in Meek’s 1962 Number One Hit for The Tornadoes, ‘Telstar’ (I have always thought it sounded rather more like a toilet than a space rocket…).

10. Being the eighties though, they would have probably sampled a space rocket. Very loudly.

11. The fact remains that Meek was in every way a maverick. He genuinely was hearing a new world - the new world technology had afforded us only a glimpse of - and attempting to communicate this to an audience.

12. Not very successfully (see 5.).

13. This is not to say Meek was not successful (see 9.).

14. Out of 245 singles he worked on, 45 were major hits (top fifty or better).

15. As a general rule though, songs about people - love and death etcetera etcetera proved more popular than songs about outer space e.g. Number One Hits ‘Johnny Remember Me’ by John Leyton and ‘Have I the right?’ by The Honeycombs.

16. My father informs me that the latter inspired a brief dance craze at youth club discos in the Knott End / Preesall area in June 1964, involving circles being formed and much stamping of feet around the chorus.

17. Girls apparently liked The Honeycombs because they had a female drummer (alas this research is confined to the Knott End / Preesall area. For the time being…).

18. To return to 14., it is possible that Joe Meek would have had more hits had he been willing to work with The Beatles (“just another bunch of noise, copying other people’s music” he remarked), David Bowie or Rod Stewart. He worked with Tom Jones but didn’t have a hit. C’est la vie.

19. At least one of the above is considered pretty important by a lot of people, but I forget which…

20. All of the above is pretty important to me.

21. This is a blog about pop music.

22. Pop music interests me for many reasons, much of which are alluded to above.

23. I enjoy pop music for an indescribable number of reasons. I like the way it innovates, enervates, immolates, encapsulates, fornicates, remonstrates, dedicates, defecates… but perhaps most of all I like the way it simply gets us singing along, sometimes for a short amount of time, and sometimes for a very long time. In this blog, I want to consider pop music – what it was, what it is and what it might be, both for me and for other people. Sometimes I might write about other things, in paragraphs not necessarily numbered. Rules are there to be broken, but in this blog I might try to formulate some of my own…